INCLUSION MATTERS: EPISODE 1 - NIMESH PATEL

I think society's attitudes to race were quite different, very different to how they are now. Life could be tough, particularly in some of the parts of London where we were living, and yeah, open discrimination wasn't as rare as I think many people would think. We had to make compromises and sacrifices. Your success rests in your own hands; you have to work hard, you have to be passionate about what you do, you have to invest your soul into that enterprise, and you have to make sacrifices. One of the things that became very clear to me early on in my career was the power of pulling together teams that thought or worked in different ways.

I grew up in central London and had a relatively modest upbringing, hardworking first-generation immigrants. My father had come here from Kenya to study for his A levels, he then got his degree, as most of his generation had done, started up a business, in fact ran several businesses at that time.

And my mother came over once they were married. I think the interesting thing about that time, which is really the 80s, the early 80s, is that society's attitudes to race were quite different, very different to how they are now, and at times life could be tough, particularly in some of the parts of London where we were living, and open discrimination wasn't as rare as I think many people would think that it is today.

With any sort of entrepreneurial venture, there's always a large degree of risk and there's always uncertainty that comes along with that, and actually I grew up with that in part. So we definitely found that there were times that were hard and that we had to make compromises and sacrifices, and there were times when things were going a little better. The other thing that I was left with a very strong sense of was work ethic, just how hard both my parents worked. Because part of owning your own business is really investing all of your time, your energy, and your effort into making it successful. There wasn't a concept of a five-day work week; it was effectively a seven-day work week. Honestly, through my entire childhood, I never went on a holiday with both my parents, because one or other always had to be here working. Holidays were relatively rare. I had a much younger brother, about six years younger than me, and while the parents were away quite often, it fell to me to look after him and help raise him. I was the one who would sit there and do his homework with him when he was struggling, I was the one who would often make lunch for him during the weekends when no one else was home. That was quite interesting for me because one of the really positive things that came out for me was that understanding that your success rests in your own hands; you have to work hard, you have to be passionate about what you do, you have to invest your soul into that enterprise, and you have to make sacrifices.

I think it's a question of being the best version of yourself. It's about understanding where your skills and your strengths lie. So at a relatively early age, I was pretty clear about how I wanted to manage my career, what things motivated me, interested me, and I was prepared to take a chance on doing something that actually I didn't know much about, and there wasn't anyone around me that could really advise me about that.

If I'm honest, I think when I started at university, I didn't have a strong drive to be an investment banker. In fact, when I started at university, I couldn't honestly have told you what investment bankers did. But what I did do was go into university with a really open mind about the opportunities that were available to me. I actually didn't intern with an investment bank. In my first year of university, during the holidays, I went to the US and I worked on the east coast as a cleaner, a cook, a busboy in various motels and restaurants. The idea was just to earn enough money to then be able to purchase an Amtrak ticket and travel up and down the east coast. Very different to the sorts of careers I might think about later. When I came back the following year, I looked at various options: accountancy firms, actuarial firms, banks. But the thing that really caught my attention was the Bank of England. I was lucky enough to be offered a place at the Bank of England working in what was then called the Gilt Edge and Money Markets Division. One of the things that really struck me was the quality of the people I was working with, really bright people, and the level of responsibility they were prepared to give me as someone brand new into the business. I was doing some really interesting work and actually had an article published in the Gilt's Review, which doesn't sound like a big thing but it certainly was for me at the time. I really enjoyed it and wanted to explore opportunities in organizations like that. What really came across for me with banking was that I describe it as the ultimate meritocracy. Investment banking is really driven by passionate people who work really hard, who are incredibly intelligent, and where that intelligence is really valued alongside insight. Most importantly, I didn't think the opportunity was constrained by anything, certainly not by age. That was important for me. In those early years into investment banking, I really didn't perceive or experience anything that I felt was holding me back from being able to do the role I really wanted to do.

For me, I was able to focus on my work because my parents took care of the business. Actually, I didn't need to spend as much time on it. I would go there from time to time, but it was rare. But I'll share this story with you because this was quite important for me. One time I went to help my parents with the business, and at that point they owned a shop. My father would do the restock of the shop once a week, so he would go to the cash and carry and come back with a car loaded up with all sorts of things to sell in the shop. There was a young kid who probably was at that point very early teens. I came in one day quite early, 7:00 in the morning, which is about the time they used to open up, and this kid was sat outside. It was cold and dark. We opened up the shop, and my father would typically go to the cash and carry at about 11:00. He went outside and spoke to the kid, then came back in. The kid was still sat there. I said, 'What? Why did you go outside?' He said, 'Oh, I know that kid. What he often does is he helps me unload the cash and carry from the car and bring it into the shop. It's really nice of him. He doesn't carry anything heavy, but he brings in stuff. He came once and asked if he could help, and I said sure. Afterwards, I said he could have a drink and some sweets or chocolate bar, whatever he wants from the shop. I like to encourage. But one time I made a mistake. Instead of going at 11:00, I had to go at 10:00. I unloaded everything myself, and then the kid showed up at 11:00. I had to say to him, 'I'm really sorry, I've done it,' but told him to take the sweets. The kid said, 'No, I haven't earned it, so I'm not going to take it. But what I'm going to do from now on is I'm going to turn up early.' So my dad had gone out and said, 'Don't worry, I'm not going till 11,' and the kid was like, 'No, I'm going to wait here.' I remember seeing him and thinking about the opportunities I'd had, and thinking to myself, this is what's really important in society. It's about how do you find kids like that? There's something innate in him. He's got a drive to want to do better, a real understanding of how he can contribute to his own success, and he's prepared to put that effort in even when it's uncomfortable, even when it's difficult, even when there perhaps isn't a role model for him to look up to. How do we support kids like that? How do we allow them to be the best version of themselves? How do we make sure that we don't lose that in the time that they grow up as other pressures come? That was one of the things I took away from the experience that my parents had in running that shop.

Yes, exactly. That's why, when I originally got involved, Reach Out as a charity sort of leapt off the page at me when I saw it, and I was immediately keen to be involved. I started by doing some volunteering work, supporting the CEO in thinking about the organization and where he wanted to take it, how to think about investing in the future of the organization, building a business plan, articulating a strategy. From there, I became a trustee of the charity. I've spent time in the schools they support and seen the work firsthand that Reach Out is able to do. The important thing about Reach Out is it's not about simply supporting attainment, it's not about improving academic standards in and of itself; that's part of it, but what it's really about is reinforcing character strengths. I thought that was so important because what allows people ultimately to be successful is having that character, having resilience, for example, having integrity. These are the things that are really important in helping people be the best version of themselves. One of the things that became very clear to me early on in my career was the power of pulling together teams that thought or worked in different ways. That's been a consistent lesson for me across every organization I've worked in since. I always refer to it as cognitive diversity. Cognitive diversity comes from bringing different insights, different experiences, different skills together. Those insights and experiences are based on diversity of gender, geography, race, sexuality, personality, as well as specialism. I always found that through those teams we delivered better outcomes, and I've always sought to build teams that have that cognitive diversity.

Absolutely. Where I really had to think carefully about how I wanted to pull my teams together and bring cognitive diversity into those teams was when I worked at Anglo American, which is a huge global organization, had over 100,000 people working there across many different countries. With the support of the then CFO, I had the opportunity to really develop a team that was comprised of the best performing talent in the organization, with the view that not only would we make a contribution to Anglo, but actually I would be developing commercial leaders for the future. I was able to go across the organization and really think about who I wanted to pull in. It occurred to me relatively early on that I thought I was building a diverse team because I was bringing people in who'd worked in different countries, we had naturally almost without thinking about it gender diversity and racial diversity because of the nature of the organization, and I had people from different parts of the business and different functions. I thought, 'Brilliant, there's a really diverse team here,' until I really started to get into some of the conversations and think about it, and I realized we all thought the same way. We were all analytical, we were all structured. There were variations in the solutions we would think about when it came to problems, but they were variations, not radically different ideas. Then I got really interested in thinking about why that is the case, is there something missing? I got to talking to some people who actually spent a lot of time thinking about these challenges, including some academics, and debating this idea with them. That's what really opened up my eyes to this concept of genuine cognitive diversity, putting people around you who don't think like you, whose framework is different in terms of how they make decisions. Then I did change the way that I started to interview because I started to look for that. There are certain questions you can ask or draw out of people's experiences, whether they are very values-based as opposed to being much more logical and analytical, how creative they are, how they like to work, are they more flexible or very structured. Out of that I was able to build those more diverse teams, and I got as a result a lot more value from those teams. I also recognize that there's no right and wrong answer; this is about how the team fits together. I always think about the team as a jigsaw puzzle. You want the overall blend of skills, some of which you want to almost conflict because you want debate within the team, you want to throw up different ideas, but you don't need all of those skills in just one or two people. If you've got five or six people in your team, you want them coming from everyone. So I started to think about holistic team management, what's the bit that I'm missing, and how do I bring that in. It wasn't just about the role and this person thinking in this way or that way, it was about how this person fits with everybody else who's already there.

I think the reason that I say I've been fortunate is because I've had line managers who have been prepared to support me and nurture the talent, or people who've been prepared to give me an opportunity when I haven't been what might have been described as the conventional candidate. I'm a Chief Financial Officer of a circa FTSE 50 company who's not an accountant, and this is my first role as CFO of a public company. I would argue that I'm not the conventional candidate, but you need people who are prepared to get over that and actually give you that opportunity. The more people that do that, the more diversity we see in corporate life, the more I think we will see it become natural in our selection process as we think about our future leaders within the organization. In terms of what do I do, I do exactly that, or at least I seek to. You've got to hold yourself accountable for always standing back and thinking: am I making the obvious choice? Have I thought more broadly about the candidates that are available? Have I thought more broadly about the value that this world can really deliver as part of the organization and as part of my team? Am I pushing myself to explore those areas where I think somebody brings something different? If there is a lack of experience or someone's bringing a different style, should we embrace that, bring that in, can we help support that person in terms of the people that sit below them in the organization, and therefore create that opportunity for them to come in and really make a difference? That's what all of us as leaders have to do in our organizations to help nurture and develop that talent.

Perhaps, yeah, I think they absolutely are, and I think it's at the heart of our strategy around people, inclusivity in particular. Because we have to make sure that this just doesn't become a very specific debate. Each one of those things are really important because we want to ensure that there is broad representation across the organization, so we are reflecting the society which we serve. That's the most important thing. What we really want to do is make sure that we're getting the best of our people because they can be the best version of themselves at work, just like they are at home. That's about investing in them, supporting them, and helping them see that the value that they bring is celebrated. I think we need to be really careful about the framework we make for decision-making and some of the language we use. We often speak about qualities when we make appointments: we talk about risk of appointing someone or making a brave decision, what does that mean? We talk about cultural fit, what does that mean? We talk about gravitas, what does that mean? None of these things are trivial; they're all important and I think they do need to be considered. But are we excluding people based on some of those preconceived notions of what constitutes risk? What do we mean when we say people have to fit within the culture? What do we mean when we say someone has gravitas or doesn't have gravitas? Are we capturing the additional value that people bring in the form of that cognitive diversity? That's what I think we have to drive, and that comes to having a true commitment.

And Marcus, I think that's the challenge. It's about getting that balance right. If we look at what the Hampton Alexander report has been able to achieve in a short space of time, it's fantastic in terms of driving gender diversity in boards, moving to executive teams, moving to below executive teams, and the development of talent more broadly in the organization. That's been a catalyst not just for the gender debate, it's then become a catalyst for a broader debate including all forms of diversity. So I think there's a role for the conversation and for encouraging people, sometimes softly, sometimes in a slightly firmer manner, to really make the change to drive that within organizations. Equally, we've got to be careful that in doing that we don't leave other people behind, we don't create other disenfranchised groups. That's why I think the inclusivity portion of the conversation is so important. It's not just about people who look like me, that's also about my colleagues in the business who are male, who have grown up in this country perhaps in middle class backgrounds, but they themselves are individuals that have their own experiences that bring their own insights to work. Sometimes, just as you rightly say, we don't see all of those things. Sometimes there is something in their life which has been different, which has shaped their personality in a certain way or given them an outlook on life which is perhaps a little bit different. We need to work harder to make sure we draw those things out from those people also.

Early in my career, I would not have had a conversation about race because I would have felt like this is something that marks me out as being different and therefore draws the spotlight, probably not in a helpful way. The person who shaped a lot of how I think about life and work and society is my grandfather. He always used to say to me, he used to instill this really strong sense of, 'What are you doing for society?' Every single role you do, he was always very proud of the progress that I made throughout my career, but his question would always be two questions at the end of it. One was, 'Okay, what comes next?' You can get that sense of that drive to always push yourself harder. The second one was, 'How is this helping? What are you doing for people around you? What are you doing for society?' I remember having this conversation with him once when one of my cousins was marrying someone who wasn't Indian, so it would have been a mixed family in terms of race. I asked him what his view was on this, and at this point he was in his late 90s. He said, 'No, this is brilliant, this is right. The way I think about it, Nimesh, is your parents, my children, came to this country to create a better future for you. You can only have that better future if you really feel part of this country. That means you have to integrate. You shouldn't forget that you're Indian by heritage, but you are British. You are part of the fabric of this country. You have a responsibility to this country to contribute. As part of that, you've got to embrace everything about this country. That means you can't be insular as a community.' I've always thought about that as one of the reasons I think that immigrant families can be successful. You really have to want to be part of that community more broadly, part of that country more broadly, and you have to embrace the culture. That doesn't mean giving up your identity, it means augmenting your identity. I think that's been powerful. We need to be careful also that it doesn't go too far, that you don't end up washing away the things that actually make you unique, that heritage, that experience, everything you've learned. Getting the balance right is key, but it's something that I'm always acutely aware of, particularly as I think about my children.

100%. There are two things I always say to my children. One is that I love that quote from Muhammad Ali when I think it was Parkinson in an interview asked him, 'What would you have done if you hadn't been a boxer?' And he said, 'It doesn't matter what I'd have done, I'd have been the best in the world at whatever it was. Even if I was a garbage man, I'd have been the best in the world.' I say that to my daughters all the time. I think they understand what I'm saying, which is I don't really mind what you do with your life so far as you push yourself to be the best that you can be.